‘This year, many of these households will be pushed into financial chaos when the cap on benefits increases take effect, compromising the health and life chances of children.’

Oxfam’s Katherine Trebeck said that on top of the 300,000 extra youngsters living below the breadline, half a million working-age adults have fallen into the extreme poverty bracket, along with 100,000 additional pensioners.

She said: ‘It is unacceptable in the seventh richest country on the planet, we’ve seen the number of people living in poverty increase by nearly a million.’

However, work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith said that relative poverty, the rod which the government uses to measure financial hardship, had fallen 100,000 among pensioners and the same among the disabled.

He said: ‘While this government is committed to eradicating child poverty, we want to take a new approach by finding the source of the problem and tackling that.’